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Los Angeles adopts Google e-mail system for 30,000 city employees
- noelchurchill 17y agoWhat is the current cost of LAs email system? How much is LA supposed to save by switching? How long are the terms of the deal?
- raintrees 17y agoAnd what happens if Google loses interest in this product? <Edit> My first line comes across as snarky, and I apologize. But it still concerns me about relying on on-line services when I have read so many articles about one company or another either losing information, selling the product to someone else who has a different agenda, or deciding to abandon a product (among other actions).
- elblanco 17y agoThis is a good point. As much as I like google, I've been bitten by the "google discontinues service xyz" problem a couple times in the past.
- jonknee 17y agoNot services that you had a 5 year SLA agreement for.
- mcav 17y agoThat's why you should only trust services that let you export your data. Fortunately, both GMail and Google Docs can do so, as noted recently in another thread.
- Barnabas 17y agoSince the assumption is that MS costs more, I thought I'd dig up some links to prove/disprove that. I learned that MS actually provides hosted Exchange services, which is more of an apples-to-apples comparison with Gmail: http://www.microsoft.com/online/buy.mspx http://www.microsoft.com/online/buy.mspx From that link, there was a "Microsoft Online Services Cost Estimator" (http://www.microsoft.com/online/estimator/default.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/online/estimator/default.aspx). I input 30,000 users for Exchange and it estimated $228,000/month. If we assume that the $7.25 million was for 5 years, then Gmail for 30,000 users costs only $120,833/month, which is theoretically $1.3 million/year less than MS hosted Exchange. For some context on how much of a big deal this is or isn't, according to the LA city budget (http://budget.lacity.org/ http://budget.lacity.org/), their total IT budget is about $100 million/year.
- DenisM 17y agoIt's so nice to see someone with actual numbers. Keep it up!
- staunch 17y agoMy first reaction was "WTF". But really it does make a ton of sense. I'll bet this deal, more than any other, scares the crap out of Balmer. If Google can get big organizations living inside the browser they're going to win the whole game.
- jonknee 17y agoWho said anything about living in the browser? Google provides my email service too and I hardly ever use the web interface.
- liquidcool 17y agoI still can't believe I can't do substring searches in gmail. I have to remember if the word was plural or not, or misspelled?? I wonder if the city council realized this when they voted. Seems like a major productivity drag to me.
- josefresco 17y ago$241 per account, that's some expensive email.
- teej 17y agoCompared to what? Consider the alternative - the cost of buying, running, supporting, and maintaining Exchange servers.
- karzeem 17y agoThe paid version of Google Apps costs $50/user/year, so for a multi-year contract, $241 isn't too bad. I'd be surprised if they could pay less than that with anyone else. (That's all assuming that LA is getting Google Apps, and not just email.)
- maukdaddy 17y agoNot compared to the cost of exchange admins, project managers, licenses, production servers, QA servers, test servers, power, cooling, load balancers, web servers for OWA, etc.
- peregrine 17y agospam filters....
- daveinla 17y agoSo gmail will let the city of LA do litigation holds on e-mail, right?!??
- martin 17y agoI was on site at one of my clients, a top investment bank, and was surprised to see the guy I was visiting was using Google Apps for his work email. Turns out they were piloting it as a potential replacement for Lotus Notes (yikes). I don't think they actually decided to go with it, but the fact that a big firm would even consider a hosted solution for something like email -- especially in the financial sector, where there's constant obsession over security and regulatory compliance -- rocked my world a bit.
- fjabre 17y agoI live in LA and this is the best use of tax money I've seen in a while =)